Kosher-Certified Food — Delivered to Your Door

WHY YOU SHOULD CARE

Because more than 11.2 million Americans buy kosher food on a regular basis. And for New Yorkers, it just got a whole lot easier.

May 31, 2014

Your lifelong dream of being able to get gefilte fish delivered right to your front door has been fulfilled!

What? That’s not your dream? Weirdo.

Kosher food buyers — this one’s for you. Morris Sued, 23, and his father Charles, have started GetKosher.com, a kosher food delivery service based in Brooklyn. It works similarly to Seamless or GrubHub: you go to the site and order your food by restaurant, selecting takeout or delivery. You can create an account and save your credit card information for easier purchasing, and the site offers rewards and discounts. The key difference from other delivery food sites: Morris guarantees you are only choosing from kosher food.

“You don’t have to question yourself if it is really kosher or not,” he says, likening the experience to shopping at a specialty kosher store or an organic store. “It’s a very niche, untapped service.”

Jewish or otherwise, kosher consumers have a high purchasing power. The kosher-certified food market pulled in more than $200 billion of the U.S.’ $500 billion in annual food sales in 2009, according to a Mintel report, and is expected to grow.Untapped, perhaps, but niche — not so much. More than 11.2 million Americans buy kosher food on a regular basis. And we aren’t just talking about conservative and Orthodox Jews. Only 15 percent of kosher consumers are buying the food to observe kosher laws. The rest do so to ensure food quality, healthiness, and food safety. Vegetarians or lactose-intolerant people often rely on the kosher symbols on products to know what is really in the food. One of kosher’s strict guidelines includes a total separation between dairy and meat products. Parve is a category of food that contains neither meat nor dairy ingredients. When parve, vegetarian and dairy products are all labeled clearly, people wishing to control their diets can trust what they are eating.

Morris Sued, Founder of GetKosher.com

Source Courtesy of Morris Sued

The Sued family is Orthodox Jewish, and they launched the site last summer to serve that community, focusing on areas heavily populated by Jews who keep kosher. They serve customers in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and a scattering of other cities in NYC and neighboring New Jersey.

The self-funded startup currently offers menus from 100 restaurants and reports that they have served more then 2,100 customers. For a handful of restaurants that don’t already offer delivery in the Brooklyn area, GetKosher.com has its own delivery service that adds about $5 to a customer’s order. This is the only added price for consumers; restaurants pay GetKosher.com a 15-20% commission on the subtotal of each order.

Morris says they are considering expanding to other places with Jewish communities including Florida, California and Pennsylvania. Right now, he says they are focusing on restaurants, but they may branch out to kosher grocery stores as well.